The Top 20 most impactful deaths in Star Trek history

Copyright CBS – William Shatner as

Captain James T Kirk

05. James T. Kirk

Did you ever imagine that the ultimate fate of Captain Kirk would be that he died because the Enterprise B couldn’t get its systems installed before the following Tuesday?

Well it wasn’t exactly that simple, though that was the inciting incident that would lead to his time in the Nexus that allowed him fight beside Captain Picard and die at the hands of Soran.

As much as Star Trek: The Next Generation had already taken the torch and run with it for seven seasons on TV, Star Trek: Generations and the death of James Kirk was the symbolic passing of the torch from the former Captain of the movie franchise to the next.

We may have already assumed him dead by the time the Enterprise D flew out on her maiden voyage to Farpoint Station, but that didn’t diminish the impact of his death on the franchise some seven years later. Our Captain lay dead, fittingly on a last away mission to an empty barren planet, and wearing a red shirt to boot.